


gingersnaps

by Anonymous



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Heavy Angst, Hurt Number Five | The Boy, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, No actual self harm, Number Five | The Boy Needs A Hug, Other, Parent/Child Incest, Past Sexual Abuse, Past Suicidal Thoughts, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, author is projecting, brief vomiting mention, self harm ideation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-08-08
Packaged: 2020-06-29 03:52:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,417
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19821982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Klaus’ freshly-baked cookies inadvertently trigger some forgotten (rotten) memories in Five.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Yo I wrote this after a horribly rough night of ptsd angst so, it's a little messy and underwritten, but hopefully not too much so.
> 
> Please heed the tags, it's a sad hours fic.

Klaus has taken up all sorts of hobbies and odd jobs now that he’s giving sobriety a try, namely so that he can bring Dave around for a few hours a day and effectively be in a ‘long-distance relationship’ from beyond the grave with his doting boyfriend. It’s so sweet, his siblings all feel at risk of brutal cavities whenever they happen upon him and Dave snuggled on the couch together watching modern romantic classics that Dave’s never seen, dancing together to Luther’s record player, or partaking in one of the new skills Klaus has been trying to pick up, like drawing or knitting.

His latest hobby, however, is baking. Grace teaches him (and sometimes Dave) how to bake perfect pies and tarts and cakes, and while Klaus’ frosting is sloppy and he has yet to master anything close to Grace’s créme brulée, he’s not bad. He always gets the taste right, even if not the looks.

It’s autumn now, and the house actually looks lived-in, decorated with warm blankets and candles and fabric foliage arrangements. 

Five likes the feel of wearing sweaters with sleeves that are too long for him and sliding his socks on the tile when no one’s looking. He likes the cookies that Klaus made for them tonight, he really does.

But there’s something about them that makes his head hurt, and not in the way that too much alcohol or too little sleep do.

His chest wants to seize up with panic and his teeth clench hard in his mouth, nails digging deep into the palms of his hands until he garners a few concerned looks in his direction from Ben and Allison. He scowls and mutters something about being busy, then spatial jumps away, and by the time he makes it up to his room, he’s already blinking back tears.

It’s nothing. If he pretends it didn’t affect him, that’s almost as good as it not affecting him, right? If he keeps it around as nothing more than an intriguing mystery to ponder by his lonesome when he’s too drunk to feel any feelings, doesn’t that make the truth so much easier to swallow?

He wants to scrape his nails across his arms, across his legs, across his entire stupid, ineffective body.

He imagines Diego’s knives would be even better.

He doesn’t do any of these things, but in that moment, he’d really, really like to.

He hates his room, hates that it’s so far away from everyone else’s. He’s being stupid. In the Apocalypse, no one had been around to help him, and he’d adapted. In the Commission, the only one who’d continuously been around him was the Handler, and the less he thought about her– (her lingering touches and stares, her fingers shoved in his mouth, her body pressing his against the wall of her office, him being too weak and malnourished to push her away). The less he thought about her, the better.

Five had done all he could to survive– he always had, he always will.

Five can’t let the universe see how broken and hurt he is.

He’s breathing fast, chest heaving up and down. 

He shakes his head out like that will do anything at all.

Sometimes he hears Delores talk to him, even though she’s back home with her friends. He figures it’s her way of calling him without a phone. _‘You should tell Vanya,’_ she says. _‘It’s not good for you to hurt in secret. Don’t you know that by now?’_

“I can’t,” he whispers to her. “I can’t tell anyone. The fact that you know is already too much.”

His eyes are running like faucets and he rubs his hands across his face, pushing the tears away over and over, keeping his gasps of emotion as muffled as he can. He hates his room, but right now he’s glad for the distance it affords.

 _‘It’s going to be okay, Five,’_ Delores soothes. _‘I love you and I believe that you’re going to be okay.’_

“None of this is okay,” Five whimpers. “I’m not okay. Delores, I don’t– I don’t know how to deal with this. I only know how to hide it.”

_‘You don’t have to hide it. None of it was your fault and I think you know that, deep down inside.’_

Five runs his hands through his own hair the way he used to in the ruins of the city, on the nights when the loneliness made his heart ache too hard and he fantasized about dying just on the off-chance that an afterlife existed and he could see his family there. He’d rake his hands over his head, through his dirty, matted hair in the best approximation of the way someone he loved would.

Now, he does that again, even though he knows he could go downstairs and cry in anyone’s arms, he could tell them––

He could, but he doesn’t want to. He doesn’t know how he would begin. They’d think he’s making it up for attention, they’d think he’s misremembering, and god, he wishes he were. Sometimes he thinks he is, sometimes he pushes his tenuous, fragile and piercing memories to the outer rim of his brain by pretending they’re not real, that he’d fever-dreamed them up as a kid.

He counts down from two hundred, trying to stop thinking.

He makes it down to 178 before he’s dragged back there, and it feels like he’ll never escape, no matter how much he tries to jump.

He’s three years old and he’s tired, but Reginald won’t let him rest. He makes him spatial jump too many times until he’s worn ragged.

Reginald leans over him, cold, unfeeling. He pulls down Five’s shorts and barks at him to lay still while he touches him in a way that feels like it burns.

Five isn’t three anymore, but he is in his old room, the room where Reginald had ruined him. He’s fourteen physically, fifty-nine mentally, and he’s disgusted and sick and everything about his life is wrong. When he was thirteen– really thirteen, thirteen for the first time around, Five had wanted to time travel for three reasons:

To prove he knew better than his father, was better than his father.

To travel to a time when Reginald was dead or not yet born, all his siblings and Grace and Pogo in tow.

And finally, most desperately, to travel back to when he was younger and kill Reginald before he could start truly abusing his children. Before he could touch Five like that and start him down the path of self-destruction and isolation.

He’d been young, he’d been weak. With the Handler, he’d been old and weak. Clearly his age didn’t matter. People took what they wanted from him, people liked to prey upon him, and maybe they always would, because Five was just so pitifully weak under all his bravado.

When Reginald would–

_‘Say it, Five, no use not calling it what it is.’_

When Reginald would molest him, Five would go quiet for hours afterward. He’d blip around the hallways and wander them by himself until he inevitably ran into Diego or Ben and they’d distract him enough to where he could pretend nothing was wrong.

One night, with Grace, in the kitchen, Five hadn’t been able to pretend anymore.

He’d been five. It had been going on so long that he couldn’t remember a time in his life without it.

He broke down, shivering, sobbing into her skirt as she hugged him tight. He knew if he told anyone, Reginald would hurt someone else in the same way, he was constantly being told that. “M-mom,” Five stuttered, sounding quite like Diego. “I– Please help me.”

Grace couldn’t help him. Five hadn’t known why at the time.

Grace couldn’t solve his problem or sufficiently protect him, but she’d done all her programming had allowed her to do. 

She’d told him it was a ginger candy, and Five loved candy. It was covered in powdered sugar, like the best kind of doughnuts were, so Five had popped it in his mouth and given it a try right away. It was kind of good at first, but a few seconds in, before he could come close to actually eating the whole candy, it seemed to set his whole mouth on fire. He spit it out in his hand, coughing. 

It was far too spicy, but it had snapped him out of his panic faster than he could have ever imagined possible.

And now, curled up in a ball on the floor, his older-younger siblings downstairs and still unaware, Five realizes what had happened, why tonight, of all nights, he’s reliving a memory that makes the Apocalypse look like a walk in the park. 

He doesn’t eat another one of Klaus’ gingersnaps, and Klaus doesn’t ask why, but he seems like he wants to.


	2. it's a process

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The truth comes out in waves, or,
> 
> Five gradually tells the truth and gets the help he needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did NOT plan on adding to this angst fest vent piece, but emotional circumstances demanded that I comfort myself by giving Five a faintly happier ending

1.

Five does tell Vanya first, one night when he’s numbed himself out with drinks, and the words spill out easily like someone's tipped over a glass of water.

“Y’know, when I worked for the Commission, my boss used to make me– she used to rape me, I guess. And that’s not all– when we were kids, dad used to. Used to _mess_ with me. Guess he couldn’t avoid being abusive in every possible category, huh? Had to cover all his bases, even sexual abuse.” He hiccups, shudders, then he pukes all over Vanya’s wood floors. 

Vanya looks like she’s about to cry, but Five himself feels light-years away from crying. Funny, that. She helps him clean up, and she’s looking at him different, and Five hates it just as much as he’d expected he would.

2.

Klaus is a touchy person, constantly draping his lanky limbs all over any of his siblings at any given time. He’s always been this way, and Five doesn’t mind it, except for when he does.

He bends Klaus’ arm back, hard enough to make his brother wince and ask him “what the hell, man?” “Well, stop fucking touching me,” Five hisses back.

He’s not afraid of Klaus. He’s _not._ He just… doesn’t like the way Klaus touches people and makes questionable jokes, because whatifwhatifwhatif––

“I hate people touching me,” he explains, voice breaking. “Dad used to _touch_ me. Don’t make me explain any more.”

Diego and Luther and of course, Five himself, have been historically known to mock Klaus’ intellect. But to Klaus’ credit, he’s clever enough that Five doesn’t need to explain here.

Klaus makes a point never to unexpectedly grab at Five anymore (hell, he pretty much avoids touching his brother at all), but weeks and months later, if Five (grudgingly) asks, Klaus lets Five burrow into his side, lets him cry on his shoulder until the fabric is soaked through.

3.

Allison is a mom now, and Five might not really be a child, but his looks paired with his abysmal social skills make her see him as something close enough. She notices all the little details, pieces them together like the clues in her detective movies.

“You hardly told me anything about what you did in the future,” she says one summer's day, calm, calculated.

“I told you what you needed to know. The rest is… extraneous.”

“Not if it’s hurting you.”

Five feels like the wind’s been knocked out of his chest.

“I just want to help,” she says earnestly.

If he’s already told two people other than Delores, what’s one more? His throat wants to close up before he can talk, but he soldiers through it. “I was an assassin in different times and places. Killing anyone who messed with the timeline, no limits, no moral code. It was usually innocent people.”

“Shit–”

“My boss was sexually abusive,” Five carries on before he can lose his nerve. _And so was dad, so was dad, so. was. dad, that’s why I was so moody and solitary as a kid, that’s why I am the way that I am now._ He doesn't know why the full truth feels so stuck in his mouth.

Allison’s face crumples. There’s motion and a scuffing of shoes in the hallway behind them. Ben might be alive again now, thanks to their time travel adventures, but his old watchful ghostly habits have apparently died hard. Five is oddly relieved. One less person he has to tell. Seems Delores was right, about telling people.

4.

Luther’s angry about it. Angrier than Five could have imagined he’d be. 

He’s so angry that he starts crying and Five’s already crying, so it’s really very messy, the way they try to talk after.

“We’re– we were the goddamn Umbrella Academy, Five. I always thought we were protecting people, but it’s rotten that no one was protecting us.”

God, that makes it so much worse. Five doesn’t think he’ll ever feel better. He won’t be happy-go-lucky like people who haven’t been stumbling through hell since their first day spent on this bitch of an earth are, but he will be alive, and he will be _Five,_ and that’s got to count for something, right?

Five tells Luther more than he's ever told anyone and it leaves him emotionally raw, but damn, does Luther make a good listener.

5.

When Five tells Diego, Diego’s hands grip the steering wheel of his parked car so tight it makes his knuckles go white.

Five’s better now, he’s seeing a therapist at Vanya’s insistence, he’s been writing and drawing and going to classes at a local college. He’s better, but _still_ , it creeps up on him and bursts out in an overpowering wave every now and then.

He tells Diego so. “It makes me want to scream. What they did to me.”

“Then do it,” Diego says.

“What?”

“Scream. Get it out of your system.”

Five moves his mouth to sneer and call that stupid, immature, beneath him, but instead– instead––

He shouts until his voice goes raspy. Then he shouts again. And again and again. Sometimes it’s a wordless cry of pain and sometimes it’s things he wishes he could say to the Handler (“I DON’T OWE YOU ANYTHING!”), things he wishes he could say to his father (“STOP TOUCHING ME!” “I HATE YOU!” “GET AWAY FROM ME!”).

When he’s done, he’s shaking, but his head feels less tense, the knot in his stomach that had been there for days, months, years– _forever_ – is loosened up to where it no longer feels like it will kill him.


End file.
